by Amber Stuart
He nodded, looking regretful.
“Will he have cured them? If not, can you cure everyone?”
“It’s not a cure,” he reminded in a gentle tone. Ryland held up a hand, such a human gesture to indicate he needed her to pause. “I will assist your friends how I can. I suspect our government will negotiate with your government to trade nanotechnology to keep Kaiser’s Syndrome and other illnesses in check in exchange for Earth’s government setting up a screening program of women who are willing to help produce offspring for the Dazon.
“To answer your other question, I have no idea if Dr. Ha would have treated the women, or if he would have left them in a weakened state to make it easier to manipulate them.”
Her heart stuttered at the thought, and she took a deep breath in a vain effort to ward off tears that prickled her eyes. “What’s he doing to them? Has he been…forcing them and impregnating them?”
Again, Ryland shrugged. “From a logical perspective, the easiest thing to do is accelerate egg production by stimulating the women to produce a larger-than-usual number of eggs. Those would be harvested, fertilized with Dazon sperm, and then grown in an exo-womb. However, I am not certain with Dr. Ha, since his ethics are clearly degraded, and he has no respect for the fact that your women are sentient beings with the right to choose for themselves.”
His words offered no comfort, but she appreciated the blunt honesty more than she would have a soothing platitude. She stood awkwardly in front of him, finding his height still impressive even now when she was back on her feet and restored to her normal height of five-seven. Unable to resist the impulse, she reached out and squeezed his hand. “Thank you so much for this, Ryland.”
He stiffened lightly at her touch, but he didn’t shrug her off. For a moment, she feared she had breached some Dazon etiquette by touching him, and she should regret the impulsive gesture. Instead, her nerve endings sang with sensation. She hadn’t experienced such an intense and immediate physical reaction in at least eight years, and probably longer. If ever.
His tawny-gold eyes darkened slightly, and she was certain his breathing pattern changed, but she didn’t know what any of that meant. In a human male, they would have been signs of arousal, but she had no way of knowing with an alien.
Regretfully, she forced herself to release him and break the flood of sensation coursing into her. She wondered if it was an actual chemical reaction from touching him, or if it was simply pheromones and attraction. She hugged herself again, tilting her head sideways as she looked up at him. A question suddenly occurred to her. “Why me?”
Ryland frowned. “Why you what, Jada?”
“Why did you pick me to help you? If you needed a human liaison, wouldn’t it have been better to pick someone in law enforcement, or even go through proper political channels? I’m no one, so why did you pick me?”
“You had put together enough of the pieces not to freak out—I believe that is the proper phrase—ad scream hysterically at the idea of an alien in your house.” His answer was perfectly logical, but something about the way he held his shoulders and the rapid movement of his eyes for a moment made her think he hadn’t told her the truth, or at least the whole truth.
That raised little alarm bells in the back of her mind, and she cautioned herself to proceed carefully. For the first time since he had offered to heal her, she wondered if he might be affiliated with the people who were taking her friends. Were they sweeping them off their feet with the promise of a cure only to be locked away in some alien harem?
Dread filled her as she realized this could simply be a taste of being healthy. It could be that soon he would present her with the choice of becoming a broodmare in exchange for keeping the technology, or else losing it and reverting back to the wheelchair. Would they consider that honoring the right to choose?
It seemed like wild speculation, but she didn’t know the alien in her living room, and she had no way to truly gauge his honesty or intentions. She had to admit it would be a powerful motivator, and if they threatened to take back the gift of health, she would probably be tempted to pump out as many alien babies as they required in order to keep the nanotechnology inside her.
“Now what?” she asked briskly. “How will we find my friends?”
He inclined his head, appearing to be deep in thought for a moment. “There appears to be a geographical pattern to the abductions. They are occurring in a random fashion in each city where they take place, but Dr. Ha and his group are moving steadily around the globe in a semi-predictable fashion and have acquired all the women registered with Kaiser’s Syndrome, except for those residing in your city. They started in the Far East and have been gradually working their way west since then. Before arriving here, they were in Toronto, where only one woman with Kaiser’s Syndrome resides.”
“Beautifuleyes_1251.”
He arched a brow ridge, looking confused. “Is that an earth idiom?”
She allowed a small smile to blossom despite her distrust. “No, that’s one of the members of my board. I bet it’s the same person. Beautifuleyes_1251 stopped posting a couple of weeks ago, and she lives in Toronto. All I have for her is an email address, but I traced her through her I.P. number and discovered she’s in Toronto. I was able to dig up a phone number for her, but she didn’t answer. I hadn’t found her cell phone number, and it was on my to-do list of things to accomplish this week.”
He looked thoughtful. “There are some things I must check out, and I would suggest you continue your computer probing.”
She tried to hide her disappointment, not liking the idea of being banished to the computer once more, though realistically that was where her most useful skills were, and it made sense to focus on her strengths. It wasn’t as though she had any sort of law enforcement or investigative training, unlike the alien inquisitor. She inclined her head to accept his decision before asking, “What are you going to investigate?”
“I’m going to see if there is some kind of holding facility that would be suitable for the doctor’s needs. He must be storing the women he’s kidnapped, and it seems unlikely he would leave them in a centralized location distant from his current location, especially if he’s in the process of egg harvesting or insemination.
“I doubt he’s had time to reach the stage of implanting blastocysts into exo-wombs, but if he’s farther along than I think, he’ll need a place capable of supporting a massive power source, and he’ll have arranged some method of travel for the people he’s kidnapped.”
A pang of worry shot through her, and she couldn’t explain it, nor the need to reach out and hold him again, once more grasping his hand with hers. She was startled by her display, but even more startled by the suddenly desperate way he clung to her hand, as though he had been denied physical affection for almost a decade as well.
It was a strange turn of events, but as they held hands and stared into each other’s eyes, her heart was pounding in her ears, and a low thrum of desire throbbed through her. For a moment, it threatened to overwhelm her and rob her senses, urging her to leap on the alien and satisfy the surge of lust consuming her.
Remembering her friends, along with all the other women facing an unknown fate allowed her to regain control and release his hand. “Be careful, Ryland Breese.”
He inclined his head in that respectful fashion of his. “And you, Jada Washington. I shall return to you when I have more information.”
She nodded and walked him to the door, this time unlocking it the old-fashioned way before solidly locking it behind him. It might not keep out an alien inquisitor, but it would keep out all the other manner of criminals and lowlifes plundering the city, and perhaps would protect her if she became the next target of the alien harvesters.
To her knowledge, they were four cases of Kaiser’s Syndrome in the entire state of New York, and three of the women, besides her, lived in the city. The third woman was not a member of the forum, and Jada didn’t even know h
er name. She’d simply seen her at the specialist’s office, and they had briefly discussed their diagnoses, but that had been years ago.
The woman had been frail at the time, with dry straw-blonde hair barely touching her neck, and her withered and faded body trapped in a wheelchair. At the time, Jada hadn’t even set up her forum yet, and though the conversation they had shared had been informative, part of her had shied away from ever seeing the woman again. At that time, she had been too sharp of a predictor of Jada’s own future that awaited.
Now, she regretted that she hadn’t exchanged some sort of contact information with the woman, and had no idea how to begin tracking her down, unless she went through her doctor’s office’s electronic records. That felt like a gross invasion of privacy, but it seemed even worse to leave the unidentified woman vulnerable to alien hunters without even trying to track her down or warn her. Jada wasn’t even sure how she would begin to convince the other woman to take the threat seriously, but she had to at least look for her.
With that thought in mind, she started with the medical records database for her doctor’s office. It took a long time to finesse her way through the safeguards, and she was both amused and impressed to find they had better security encryptions than the local police department.
Slowly, she was able to access the system, finally getting full permission to see all the data. She set up a search parameter to look for Kaiser’s Syndrome, expecting to get one hit.
The woman she was looking for had been in fairly bad shape eight years ago, so she might have already passed away, but Jada hoped her doctor had converted his old records into electronic records. If so, there should at least be a mention of his former patient, who could still be his current patient.
To her surprise, there were two results for her search for Kaiser’s Syndrome. The first file belonged to a Mary Catherine Jones, and she had recently seen Dr. Evans. Jada used her newly restored hands, no longer concerned about pulls and sprains from a simple task like typing or writing, to copy and paste Mary Catherine’s contact information onto the computer’s notepad. She didn’t probe any deeper into the medical records than was necessary to confirm Mary Catherine was probably the person she was looking for.
Curious, she opened the second result, and concern flooded her as she read the case file. It was from a database for AmbaCorp, a medical research group that was connected with the same hospital as her doctor’s practice, though located in a different building on the other side of the city. Ostensibly, the study was calling for participants with Kaiser’s Syndrome to test an investigational medication meant to reduce excess joint elasticity. Considering Kaiser’s Syndrome was barely a blip on the medical radar, it seemed unlikely that a study would be underway to test joint effects, when it was one of the milder side effects of Kaiser’s Syndrome.
She dug deeper, looking at the address of the medical research building in question. To her surprise, it wasn’t simply an office in the building, but rather took up an entire three-story office building on the outskirts of Brooklyn. Why would a medical research company need such a large facility?
She knew most medical research businesses kept at least a superficial layer between themselves and the manufacturers of the drugs they were testing. They were generally third-party contractors hired to carry out the tests designed by pharmaceutical companies, and she wasn’t highly knowledgeable about it, but she’d never heard of people going directly to a lab facility where actual experiments were concurrently conducted in order to participate in a medical study—especially not for a joint medicine.
She made several notes on the notepad document as she waited for Ryland’s return, her suspicions growing. Further probing revealed the business was hooked up to public utilities, but had very low power usage compared to most businesses of its size. It took her less than an hour to determine the average usage, and the company was coming nowhere near it.
That was a puzzling contradiction, because Ryland had mentioned specifically that any storage facility would likely require a great deal of electricity. Still, there was enough about the business to be suspicious, and she was impatient for Ryland’s return.
As the day dwindled into evening, she looked up when light emanated from her door, and the locks popped open in quick succession. A moment later, the door opened to reveal the alien, and she grinned at him. “You could have just rung the bell like normal people, and I would have opened the door for you.”
He arched his brow ridge. “I’m not a normal people, am I? Besides, I didn’t want to alarm you with an unknown presence, so I assumed it would be better to open the door myself.”
“I could have been indecent. You might have caught me in a compromising position.”
His brow ridge furrowed. “What sort of compromising position?”
She giggled for a moment before the sound choked off. Was she flirting with him? How did one even flirt with an alien who wasn’t of one’s species? Besides, he probably wouldn’t be interested in her.
She waved a hand, hoping to dismiss the whole subject, as something prickled in the back of her mind. She turned to the page she had printed out, about to go over it with him, when the realization flooded her mind.
She might be highly desirable to this alien, because she was a genetic match that could carry his offspring. Even if he wanted nothing more than babies from her, he was likely to be interested and protective. She could use that to her advantage.
She scowled at the thought, shoving it away. She had no intention of using Ryland for anything, whether it be sexual relief or something more mundane. She certainly wasn’t going to trick or seduce him into breaking her eight-year dry spell, no matter how much she craved his touch.
It had to be simple proximity. She hadn’t been near a man who wasn’t a doctor or caregiver in the last seven years, since Barry had bailed. She was in the best health of her life, and it was only normal for her libido to be awake and raring to go after all that time. Any man would have elicited the same response, and he wasn’t even a man. He was an alien, for goodness sake. What was she thinking?
“I had some luck, Jada.”
Forcing her thoughts to turn from the carnal and back to the business at hand, she grasped the page of notes and turned to face him. “So did I, but tell me what you found first please?”
“New York is full of nooks and crannies, and there are more places to hide a large-scale operation like Dr. Ha might be undertaking than I would have guessed in a city of this geographic size, and so filled with a large populace.”
She nodded. “New York’s a good place to hide secrets, I guess.”
“However, I did discover that a cargo plane landed at a private airstrip near JFK two weeks ago. Tracing the origins, the same plane has stopped everywhere there have been disappearances, and in the same order as I predict Ha has progressed. Unfortunately, there was no one at the plane or the airfield when I went to investigate, but I have a link, so perhaps I can track down someone in the company and learn more. At least now we know how he’s flying them around, so that’s progress.”
“That’s good news. I found something too.” She handed him the page. “You can read English, right?”
“My translator can rapidly translate it for me. I don’t actually speak, read, or write English, but I doubt you can tell the difference or detect the slight delay from the translator changing my words to the right form for you.”
“Oh, okay. Anyway, I knew there was at least one other woman with Kaiser’s Syndrome in the city. I set out to track her down, since we share a doctor. In the process, I discovered she is still alive, and our doctor has recommended her for a study for a medication that will reduce overextension of the joints in Kaiser’s patients. She’s been enrolled, and when she went to the program four days ago, she hasn’t been seen since.
“There’s been no hits on her credit card or debit card, and from what I could tell from her landline, she’s had a few incoming phone calls,
but has placed no outgoing calls. Most of the calls last less than a minute, suggesting the caller is leaving a message.
“I also checked delivery records for restaurants nearby, assuming she has the same culinary weaknesses of the rest of us, and discovered she’s a fan of Thai food, ordering it at least twice a week, but nothing at all in the last four days.”
“This is Mary Catherine Jones of whom you speak?” At her nod, his gaze moved lower down the page. “And you suspect the study is a front for Dr. Ha to acquire Kaiser’s patients?”
She lifted a shoulder. “It makes sense, except for electricity usage. It’s too low for a business that size, even if they’re doing nothing more than running conference rooms and doing basic labs studies—which if that’s all they’re doing, why do they need a fifteen thousand square-feet facility with three floors?”
Ryland inclined his head. “It’s a very large space for one business of that type, but would provide ideal quarters if you’re trying to hold four hundred women, and you needed a floor for medical research, another for housing here prisoners, and a third to act as the front to lure in more patients. It’s also unlikely he would rely on a human power source to keep the facility running. Dazon technology is more efficient and highly portable.”
“I was thinking tomorrow I should go check it out.”
Ryland stiffened. “What?”
She tilted her head sideways. “It makes perfect sense. I have Kaiser’s Syndrome, so it gives me a good reason to snoop around a bit. I don’t have to commit to joining their study, but I can see the layout and try to determine if it’s just a medical research facility, or if there’s something more going on.”
Ryland crossed his arms over his chest, and his fierce scowl was hot enough to melt off the top layer of her skin. “Absolutely not. Do you know how dangerous that will be?”
She nodded. “I’m aware, but it will be much easier for me to get in than it would be for you. I actually have the disease.”
